Brain Food #858: Alchemy, resonance, and the difference between positive and magical thinking

“Mountains and thunderous rivers belong to a few cells in my brain, or to some corner of paradise.
Tonight, for the first time in my own experience of this harbour in Brittany, a large band of fog from west to east underlines the horizon... I must have been homesick for fog, and it arrived!”
— Etel Adnan

Often, what we yearn for can be as ungraspable as fog. Between the longing and the arrival, our thinking shapes our experience. Lately, I have been reflecting on the difference between magical thinking and positive thinking. One relies on the power of belief alone to influence outcomes. The other believes that whatever happens, we still have the sole thing that distinguishes humans from other beings: the agency to shape our responses and choose our actions.

In magical thinking, we believe our longing for something can magically produce the very thing we have longed for. It implies a form of alchemy, in which our thoughts meet the world and, as a result, change our circumstances. Magical thinking is largely based on assumptions; by thinking something we can make it so, as Paulo Coelho perhaps suggested in The Alchemist when he wrote, “If you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire in your favour.”

Though it can have value by serving as a defence or coping mechanism for uncertainty, magical thinking’s overreliance on the power of thought alone can also lead to inaction.

Positive thinking is more closely related to having faith in the actions of the world and our actions in it—relinquishing control while still believing something positive might come along, and being receptive to whatever does.

In The Uncontrollability of the World, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa talks about feeling alive as a resonance between ourselves and the world. Where or how that resonance comes about is not up to us:

“Whether resonance occurs or what its result might be remains uncontrollably open. In my view, this kind of relatedness forms the basis of the practice of prayer, which cannot be understood otherwise. In contrast to what happens in the practices of alchemy or magic, in prayer there is no attempt to manipulate the other side or to engineer a particular result. The aim is rather to feel or sense an accommodating response, the content of which is not predetermined. […] In sociological terms, this means that resonance always has

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